Thomas Kuhn delivered a substantial challenge to the scientific establishment with his 1962 publication of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." He claimed that science is not always a linear, cumulative or rational process of inquiry. Rather, Kuhn believed that the history of science combines long periods of evolving thought –what he called “normal science” – with revolutionary developments that challenge and ultimately change deeply held views.
Ironically, Kuhn was attempting to create a new paradigm for how the world viewed one of its most fundamental paradigms – the sanctity and veracity of scientific inquiry. He viewed scientific inquiry through the filters of human nature and the political realities of collaborative communities. By doing so, Kuhn asserted that scientific inquiry and its historical reporting can be a more subjective, emotional and even tribal enterprise than most scientific communities would care to imagine or admit.
Kuhn’s work suggests that the structure of scientific revolution finds interesting and instructive parallels in political revolution as well as what Dru calls the “market disruptions” that occur amidst business, economic and technological change.
This paper comments on how Kuhn’s work advanced our understanding of change in the social sciences, whether such change occurs at the nation-state, organization, team or individual level. Interestingly, Kuhn’s work came decades before change management was popularized in works ranging from Kotter’s "Leading Change" to Johnson and Blanchard’s "Who Moved My Cheese?" This paper also briefly considers Kuhn’s work through the dialectic prism advanced by Hegel and later posited by Chalybäus as the relationship among thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Understanding Change
New ideas can challenge long-held assumptions, evoke risk-averse behaviors and stir deep-seated emotions. Even something as simple as the disruption of established seating patterns can challenge individuals and upset group dynamics, as Nafisi said of her students in "Reading Lolita in Tehran." “They kept that arrangement, faithfully, to the end. It became representative of their emotional boundaries and personal relations.”
The real and perceived changes inherent in new ideas can be threatening to individuals, teams, communities and governments invested in the status quo and, perhaps, dependent on it for their livelihood and self-esteem. Threats to existing conventions can create cognitive dissonance and produce resistance in many forms, which include denial, passive-aggressive behaviors, condemnation and outright sabotage. For years, employees have been greeted with the status-quo refrain, “That’s not the way we do things around here” when trying to work differently and, perhaps, more efficiently and effectively.
Kotter reminds us that resistance to change is often “irrational,” “political resistance to change never fully dissipates,” and regression always remains possible. Kuhn asserted that even the formal rigors of scientific inquiry are not immune from these foibles of human nature. Close-knit scientific communities hold certain truths to be self-evident. According to Kuhn, these received beliefs serve as the basis of reward, recognition and self-justification within any paradigmatic community. As such, threats to the existing paradigm in the form of what Kuhn called “anomalies” break the rules and disrupt norms to which the community bears strict allegiance. Some of these anomalies become new paradigms around which different orthodoxies are then created and fiercely defended.
Political revolutions often follow this pattern. The government is seen as a change-resistant, self-justifying and complacent body interested chiefly in consolidation of power and self-preservation. A disruptive force for change succeeds in challenging the existing order of things. Over time, however, this new paradigm starts to resemble the old paradigm at least in its focus on self-justification and self-preservation. Taking the long view, for example, the Russian Revolution seems only to have created another type of tsarist rule, including in Stalinism a vastly more brutal one. There is in Russia today yet another tsarist oligarchy emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Too often, it seems, the French writer Alphonse Karr was correct in stating that, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Kuhn’s assessment of human nature and the resistance to change suggests that this is not at all surprising.
In the cosmic scheme of things, literally, Copernicus challenged the long-held view of geocentricity. He disrupted the centuries-old Ptolemaic certainty that the Earth was at the center of the solar system, claiming instead that earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. His contention ignited scientific, cultural and political revolutions as it did claims of blasphemy among church officials of the day. Ultimately, it took the Catholic Church and other change resisters many centuries to accept that the Earth and the other planets actually rotated around the sun. Indeed, Johnson and Blanchard might have asked, “Who moved my planets?”
An almost-Ptolemaic insularity and self-indulgence had Henry Ford refusing to believe that any American would ever want or need any automobile other than a Model T. A paradigmatic hubris, of sorts, found Digital Equipment Corporation’s CEO Kenneth Olsen, the man who invented the minicomputer, asking disdainfully in the early 1980s why anyone would want a computer on their desktop? The very individuals who disrupted old paradigms became blinded by their own paradigms. Aren’t the fear of change and the disruption of paradigm behind John Updike’s recent denunciation of the digitization of books as “grisly”?
Kuhn also suggested that paradigmatic revolution is often the product of young people who are not yet invested in the existing order. Interestingly, Kuhn was a young graduate student at Harvard when he wrote Structure. Is it any wonder that the old Henry Ford, Ken Olsen and John Updike are so very different than their younger counterparts?
Rationalizing Change
Among Kuhn’s most interesting beliefs concerned the history of scientific inquiry. He believed that scientific inquiry moved in revolutionary epochs amid the routines of normal science. Yet in Chapter XI (The Invisibility of Revolutions), he contended that these revolutions are ultimately made invisible by their historical reporting, thus minimizing if not eliminating the validity of revolution as an essential function unto itself.
Kuhn maintained that scientific inquiry is reconstructed in more linear, cumulative forms so as to give adherents to the new paradigm the sense that their work is a logical outgrowth of all previous work. Granted, the winners write the history of most wars and revolutions. Yet, the rationalization of change and rewriting of history seems to appeal to a very human desire for order and clarity. It’s what the American humorist Mason Cooley meant when he said that, “Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end.”
Viewed in Hegelian terms popularized by Chalybäus, scientific revolution does not move neatly from thesis to antithesis and ultimately to a harmonious, integrative synthesis. Instead, Kuhn told us that scientific revolutions wholly displace and even destroy old paradigms, just as wars and revolutions lay siege to old structures. It seems, however, that Kuhn would have believed in Cooley’s notion of “tidying up at the end,” since it’s the historical reporting of scientific inquiry with its omission of the underlying disruption and resistance that creates an appearance of synthesis that too often belies the truth. That’s why, in Kuhn’s words, so many scientists spend their time simply “mopping up.”
References
Cooley, M. (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection, New York (1989).
Dru, Jean-Marie. (1996). Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace, New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Johnson, S. and Blanchard, K. (1998). Who Moved my Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, New York, Putnam Adult.
Karr, A. (1808–1890), French journalist, novelist. Les Guêpes (Paris, Jan. 31, 1849).
Kotter, J. (1996). Leading Change, Boston, Harvard Business School Press.
Nafisi, A. (2004). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York, Random House.
Wilsey, S. Why John Updike Is So Wrong About Digitized Books, Time Magazine Online, May 31, 2006
Ironically, Kuhn was attempting to create a new paradigm for how the world viewed one of its most fundamental paradigms – the sanctity and veracity of scientific inquiry. He viewed scientific inquiry through the filters of human nature and the political realities of collaborative communities. By doing so, Kuhn asserted that scientific inquiry and its historical reporting can be a more subjective, emotional and even tribal enterprise than most scientific communities would care to imagine or admit.
Kuhn’s work suggests that the structure of scientific revolution finds interesting and instructive parallels in political revolution as well as what Dru calls the “market disruptions” that occur amidst business, economic and technological change.
This paper comments on how Kuhn’s work advanced our understanding of change in the social sciences, whether such change occurs at the nation-state, organization, team or individual level. Interestingly, Kuhn’s work came decades before change management was popularized in works ranging from Kotter’s "Leading Change" to Johnson and Blanchard’s "Who Moved My Cheese?" This paper also briefly considers Kuhn’s work through the dialectic prism advanced by Hegel and later posited by Chalybäus as the relationship among thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Understanding Change
New ideas can challenge long-held assumptions, evoke risk-averse behaviors and stir deep-seated emotions. Even something as simple as the disruption of established seating patterns can challenge individuals and upset group dynamics, as Nafisi said of her students in "Reading Lolita in Tehran." “They kept that arrangement, faithfully, to the end. It became representative of their emotional boundaries and personal relations.”
The real and perceived changes inherent in new ideas can be threatening to individuals, teams, communities and governments invested in the status quo and, perhaps, dependent on it for their livelihood and self-esteem. Threats to existing conventions can create cognitive dissonance and produce resistance in many forms, which include denial, passive-aggressive behaviors, condemnation and outright sabotage. For years, employees have been greeted with the status-quo refrain, “That’s not the way we do things around here” when trying to work differently and, perhaps, more efficiently and effectively.
Kotter reminds us that resistance to change is often “irrational,” “political resistance to change never fully dissipates,” and regression always remains possible. Kuhn asserted that even the formal rigors of scientific inquiry are not immune from these foibles of human nature. Close-knit scientific communities hold certain truths to be self-evident. According to Kuhn, these received beliefs serve as the basis of reward, recognition and self-justification within any paradigmatic community. As such, threats to the existing paradigm in the form of what Kuhn called “anomalies” break the rules and disrupt norms to which the community bears strict allegiance. Some of these anomalies become new paradigms around which different orthodoxies are then created and fiercely defended.
Political revolutions often follow this pattern. The government is seen as a change-resistant, self-justifying and complacent body interested chiefly in consolidation of power and self-preservation. A disruptive force for change succeeds in challenging the existing order of things. Over time, however, this new paradigm starts to resemble the old paradigm at least in its focus on self-justification and self-preservation. Taking the long view, for example, the Russian Revolution seems only to have created another type of tsarist rule, including in Stalinism a vastly more brutal one. There is in Russia today yet another tsarist oligarchy emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Too often, it seems, the French writer Alphonse Karr was correct in stating that, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Kuhn’s assessment of human nature and the resistance to change suggests that this is not at all surprising.
In the cosmic scheme of things, literally, Copernicus challenged the long-held view of geocentricity. He disrupted the centuries-old Ptolemaic certainty that the Earth was at the center of the solar system, claiming instead that earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. His contention ignited scientific, cultural and political revolutions as it did claims of blasphemy among church officials of the day. Ultimately, it took the Catholic Church and other change resisters many centuries to accept that the Earth and the other planets actually rotated around the sun. Indeed, Johnson and Blanchard might have asked, “Who moved my planets?”
An almost-Ptolemaic insularity and self-indulgence had Henry Ford refusing to believe that any American would ever want or need any automobile other than a Model T. A paradigmatic hubris, of sorts, found Digital Equipment Corporation’s CEO Kenneth Olsen, the man who invented the minicomputer, asking disdainfully in the early 1980s why anyone would want a computer on their desktop? The very individuals who disrupted old paradigms became blinded by their own paradigms. Aren’t the fear of change and the disruption of paradigm behind John Updike’s recent denunciation of the digitization of books as “grisly”?
Kuhn also suggested that paradigmatic revolution is often the product of young people who are not yet invested in the existing order. Interestingly, Kuhn was a young graduate student at Harvard when he wrote Structure. Is it any wonder that the old Henry Ford, Ken Olsen and John Updike are so very different than their younger counterparts?
Rationalizing Change
Among Kuhn’s most interesting beliefs concerned the history of scientific inquiry. He believed that scientific inquiry moved in revolutionary epochs amid the routines of normal science. Yet in Chapter XI (The Invisibility of Revolutions), he contended that these revolutions are ultimately made invisible by their historical reporting, thus minimizing if not eliminating the validity of revolution as an essential function unto itself.
Kuhn maintained that scientific inquiry is reconstructed in more linear, cumulative forms so as to give adherents to the new paradigm the sense that their work is a logical outgrowth of all previous work. Granted, the winners write the history of most wars and revolutions. Yet, the rationalization of change and rewriting of history seems to appeal to a very human desire for order and clarity. It’s what the American humorist Mason Cooley meant when he said that, “Conscious thought is the tidying up at the end.”
Viewed in Hegelian terms popularized by Chalybäus, scientific revolution does not move neatly from thesis to antithesis and ultimately to a harmonious, integrative synthesis. Instead, Kuhn told us that scientific revolutions wholly displace and even destroy old paradigms, just as wars and revolutions lay siege to old structures. It seems, however, that Kuhn would have believed in Cooley’s notion of “tidying up at the end,” since it’s the historical reporting of scientific inquiry with its omission of the underlying disruption and resistance that creates an appearance of synthesis that too often belies the truth. That’s why, in Kuhn’s words, so many scientists spend their time simply “mopping up.”
References
Cooley, M. (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection, New York (1989).
Dru, Jean-Marie. (1996). Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace, New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Johnson, S. and Blanchard, K. (1998). Who Moved my Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, New York, Putnam Adult.
Karr, A. (1808–1890), French journalist, novelist. Les Guêpes (Paris, Jan. 31, 1849).
Kotter, J. (1996). Leading Change, Boston, Harvard Business School Press.
Nafisi, A. (2004). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York, Random House.
Wilsey, S. Why John Updike Is So Wrong About Digitized Books, Time Magazine Online, May 31, 2006